Here

 Tom Hanks has had a leading man career since the 1980s and is keeping himself relevant by playing complex characters who are not always the dad types many people, rightly or wrongly, often associate Hanks with.   In recent years he has headlined a Western directed by Paul Greengrass (News of the World)  and left a strong impression as the grumpy retiree in A Man Called Otto.  When asked to describe the movie “Elvis” I answered stating “You will hate Tom Hanks in this movie.”  In the film “Here” Hanks reteams with director Robert Zemeckis which with his made the cultural landmark “Forrest Gump”,  as well as “Cast Away” (my favorite of their collaborations), Polar Express, and Pinocchio (which I have not seen-nor have many others based on the grosses). 

Zemeckis has always been an innovative director and his films often defy easy characterization.  The Back to the Future films mix comedy and science fiction.  Death Becomes Her is a comedic horror satire on aging.  Flight is a dramatic study of an alcoholic which has an extended sequence of a terrifying flight.   Who Framed Roger Rabbit mixes film noir with animation.  For many years Zemeckis’ name on a film could guarantee a wide audience but lately the grosses have been lighter.  Ahead of its release I felt this film might turn that around but Here also received middling reviews and box office.  

Robin Wright, who also starred in Forrest Gump as Forrest’s true love Jenny plays Margaret, the wife  of Hanks’ character Richard. Wright has had a fine career with many leading and supporting roles in films like Message in a Bottle, Moneyball, The Pledge, but recently is probably most known for House of Cards where she played the Machiavellian Claire Underwood.  I mostly really enjoyed that show but did not care for the final season which was kind of thrown together after Kevin Spacey was fired.  The show was at its best when Claire and Spacey’s Frank were scheming either together or against each other.

Eric Roth, the Academy Award winning screenwriter who worked on Forrest Gump, The Insider, Killer of the Flower Moon and many other high profile pictures, wrote the script with Zemeckis, which is based on a graphic novel that tells the story of one place and the people who pass through it over time.  Alan Silvestri, who has worked on Zemeckis films back to Romancing the Stone in 1984, provides the score.  Don Burgess who is another frequent Zemeckis collaborator, did the unique cinematography. 

Here is an appropriate project for so many people who worked on Forrest Gump to reunite as there is a thematic link.  Gump examined a period of history through a character who only had a vague sense of the seismic events he was witnessing.  Here looks at the history of America from the viewpoint of one piece of land where a house is built in the early 20th century.  Zemeckis and Don Burgess place the camera in living room of the house and use a picture frame to transition from one time period to another in a nonlinear fashion.  The film takes through a quick recap of history as it starts off with dinosaurs (which led me to think of how unique a Zemeckis directed Jurassic film might be-in the very unlikely event that it were to occur) and then we see an explosion which likely represented an asteroid hitting the earth, taking out most life and leading to an Ice Age after which the land turns green.  I think this goes a little too fast.  The film then moves in and out of several periods including a Revolutionary War period in which we see Benjamin Franklin’s son William (and later Franklin himself), two different couples in the first half of the 20th century, an African American family who buys it in the early 21st century, but the central story revolves around the Young family, headed by Paul Bettany’s WW2 veteran Al and his wife Rose, played by Kelly Riley.  They have three children, the oldest of which is Richard, eventually played by Hanks.

Spoilers below:

The Young family is in an interesting look at Americana.  Betanny plays a stubborn man who loves his family but is probably stuck in the wrong career and it leads to some bad choices.  Rose is very supportive and puts up with a lot more than she should.  Some of Al’s worse tendencies feed to Richard whose own stubbornness ruins his marriage since although he is overall a better husband to Margaret than his father is to Rose, he grows up in a time where women have far more independence than his mother did.

Richard gets his girlfriend pregnant at 18, marries her in the living room and the stress of living in the same house as his family causes a crack in their marriage as Margaret never feels like she is living her own life.  It is refreshing after seeing Wright and Hanks as an unconventional couple in Forrest Gump as a far more traditional one here, using their own voices.  Every time I heard Margaret speak to her frustrations with the house I knew they were in trouble since the film was always going to stay put.  By framing the story in this way we see the long term impact of small actions (Richard and Margaret fool around on the couch which leads to her pregnancy, Richard’s bullheadedness about moving even though they could probably afford it). 

The focus on the Young family does detract a little from the other stories.  A bohemian couple played by Ophelia Lovibond and David Flynn have some entertaining scenes but they come across as fairly one dimensional and are only in the house for a few years before the Youngs.  Prior to that when the house is built the Harters reside there (played by Michelle Dockery and Gwilym Lee).  To me they existed less as characters than as touch points for the birth of aviation and the Spanish flu outbreak.  The Harris family (played by Nicholas Pinnock, Nikki Amuka-Bird, and Cache Vanderpuye) and their housekeeper (Anya Marco Harris) occupy the house after Richard finally sells it in the early 21st century.  The house looks far more modern but again the only impression left on me was the father giving the son the “talk” about how to behave if pulled over by the police and the poor housekeeper passing away from COVID-19.  The Indigenous characters played by Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum barely register at all, except we see that the wife passes away.  The Revolutionary War scenes are also kind of throwaway and surprisingly has production values that you might see in a short film at a museum.

The structure of the film calls for short scenes that for the most part just make their point and then transition to something else, the way they would in a graphic novel.  Here sometimes feels like a combination between a film and a stage play as the actors will come closer to the foreground for a quiet scene but might be further back for a less consequential moment. Zemeckis and editor Jesse Goldberg often will show a scene featuring the Youngs and then switch to one of the other periods to then drop in on the Youngs at a different time.  The film is presented in a nonlinear fashion but each story is presented sequentially (the Young story is always moving forward as are the Harris, Harter, etc even though the film zips in and out of different periods).  Digital effects are used to mark the different ages of the cast (68 year old Hank and 58 year old Wright age from about 18 to 79).  I felt they were believable enough by modern standards though I did not need see this film on the big screen.

The single setting could become tiring for the viewer but I never felt that way.  The film is well under two hours and in one of the later scenes where Richard and Margaret have a nice Thanksgiving dinner after their divorce in late middle age it feels like it has come quickly.  I sense that there may have been more scenes of the other families and test screenings called for the filmmakers to focus more on the Young family.  

The finale, in which now 80ish Richard and Margaret visit the house when it is presumably on the market after the Harris family exit, is a nice button to the film.  I think we are supposed to infer that they are not married but that Richard is helping Margaret manage her dementia.  The finale shot when the camera exits the house to show the surrounding area (with the hummingbird who flies in and out of the film) is reminiscent of the feather that flows throw Forrest Gump.  The house’s location is never defined but given the references to the Franklin family and dialogue throughout the film it is likely near Philadelphia but could be either New Jersey or Pennsylvania. 

Here struggles a little to surpass its limitation single but Zemeckis and his team handle it about as well as possible.  The film is less successful than Forrest Gump since the characters are scene in small glimpses and thus far less developed but I applaud Zemeckis’ commitment to continue to challenge himself and his team to do new things in cinema.  I encourage audiences who missed it in the cinema to give it 104 minutes of their time.  ***